Multi-tenant software systems are a new breed of hosted software applications, whereby a service-provider installs one such application that is – concurrently – used by several of its customers. The ideas behind multi-tenant systems are closely related to the Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) paradigm, in the sense that service that are available on the market will act as multi-tenant software systems.

As such, we have defined a number of research questions that this project aims to solve are:

What is an efficient architecture for multi-tenant systems?

What insights does the Architectural Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) provide us with the current architecture and other possible architectural styles for multi-tenant systems?

How can software architectures be evaluated in terms of scalability?

What data model offers optimal scalability for multi-tenant systems?

How should variation points be defined in order to optimize configurability in multi-tenant systems?

How should these applications be tested (thread-safeness, dynamic configurability, …)?

This project runs in close collaboration with Exact Software, where we will follow an industry-as-laboratory research-style, meaning that actual research problems are drawn from industry and that researched solutions are tried out immediately in the industrial context.